Diablo 3 Clan Control Improvements Coming

Talking to John Yang at the community corner booth on Saturday night, he told me that various improvements to the clans interface were on their way, including the ability to see how long since a member last logged on. I had that in my notes to share with you guys, and lots more from Storytime with Wyatt (I live tweeted a few choice tidbits Saturday night), and tonight I’m recording a podcast with N3rdwards and Rankil about their Blizzcon 2014 experience… but a Blue post got to the clan member info first, so here’s the confirmation.

Diablo 3 Clan Control Improvements Coming:

Clans badly need… The ability to see how long a clan member has been offline so we can “refresh” our clans. Tyvalir: The ability to see how long a clan member has been offline is coming in the PTR for patch 2.1.2, along with the ability to sort clan members by offline duration (as well as some other social improvements). Keep an eye on the upcoming notes for patch 2.1.2, and let us know what you think of these new features on the PTR!

Once this goes live, if you’re in a clan you’ll want to pop on every now and then, even if you’re taking a month or two off, just to refresh your “last online” status. Speaking as an officer in a couple of ~150 member clans, we’re always looking to find ways to get more new/active players in, which means removing some inactives, and if/when we can easily see the last logged on date, that’ll become far more real.

I would seriously like to know their reasoning for the 150 limit. Out of all the design decisions this one makes the least amount of sense. It makes no difference whatsoever in server technology. It is just some arbitrary number they came up with that is not near large enough. I should not have to worry about taking a break from the game and then coming back to find myself without a clan. Who cares if a clan has a 1000 members and only 50 actives.

There would be zero need to fix or add clan management features if they simply raised this limit.

I've always assumed 150 was capped for some technical reason. More than that at once sharing game access and legendary found messages would cause problems or lag. Of course there's never more than 10% active at once, so…

Well you know the way these things are designed, you have to account for the worst case scenario happening, such as if all 150 members are on-line at the same time and everybody identifies a bunch of legendaries at the same time. In reality that's not going to happen, but they have to program to be able to withstand that. I also imagine if you actually had 150 people all on at the same time and everybody was chatting, the chat would be extremely tough to follow, really spammy.

It was be great to actually be able to see who is in a community rather than it just showing me and Elly and none of the other hundreds of members it says are in the community. I hope I'm not the only one with that issue in different clans.

I'm hoping for more impacting changes to the social features, than just some long overdue control improvements. At the moment, they offer not much more to the game experience, than to aggregate people with high probability of being interested in coordinated group play and allowing them to show off to each other.

And though the latter is usually a reliably working method to hold out the carrot upfront in any item centered game, the utter reliance on itemization as the players way of growth in D3 and its heavy reliance on rng turns it into more of a demotivational tool, by constantly showing the player how unlucky he is. At least to mostly solo players like me, who are not playing this game primarily with socializing in mind, thus in consequence the features potential use in creating good opportunities to bond over gets lost.

Without more game impacting elements, the best social feature Blizzard could deliver to us, would still be creating an offline version with the only online features being an ingame instant messenger and an irc-style chat with closed chat room and easy filter list creation capabilities, available from startscreen, and to just cope with the idots ruining their own fun by cheating, as their doing with the console version.

And even if there would be options included to open up direct connection type mp games: Through the then given need for circles of trust, clans and communities would instantly possess much more of that "game impacting" attribute that we'd need of them beyond the playground, to be of interesting use to us. Especially clans are usually found going hands in hands with organizational necessities created by the correspondent games design. But due to D3s lack of decent group PvP and a surrounding framework offering long term goals to clans to strife for, they're essentially just in the game to be in the game.

Granted, the arpg gameplay itself does not offer much to build this framework upon. It even provides no elements (, like raids in MMOs, ) creating organizational needs, thus some form of metagame has to be created explicitly for the framework. But that's exactly what I'm hoping and waiting for from the developement team: A framework giving a meaning to clans and communities being in the game by providing these longterm goals.

I still hate the fact, that trading is nearly forbidden (restricted to 3 players, who are in the same game while your legendary drops) Personally me has a friend which started Diablo 3 and doesn’t play as much as I do. I would love boosting him in some ways, just because that’s a nice move, if your remember D2 times. Where every starter was so happy about a Viper e.g.

Regarding to clans, this is the first option enabling some more “trades” or “presents” within the clan. Of course items should only be tradeable, when the clanmate already was in clan when the item dropped. What do you think?